Tag Archives: the maltese falcon 1931

I saw the new Godzilla yesterday. I enjoyed it a lot, but I’ve been weirded out for months over the fact that I’ve had to call it something I’ve never had to call a Godzilla film. Just like how I recently had to call a Bond film something that, in 50 years of recasting and returns to ground zero, I’ve never had to call a Bond film.

I’m all for specialized vocabulary. Film needs its own exclusive words to describe its own processes, but ‘reboot’ is not one such word. I’ve asked people time and again to define it, and I’ve read about it online—god help me, I’ve even read the Wikipedia pagefor it. It’s just not a real and distinct concept. It’s a cheap marketing buzzword, that’s all it is. And more than that, the very existence of the term is symptomatic of a rot at the core of contemporary filmmaking.